Revolution or War

In the previous issue of
the International Review, we
underlined the importance of the new decade, which we called the "years of truth." In particular we
emphasized that the bourgeoisie was taking a qualitative step forward in its
prep­arations for a new world war:

"In a sense the seventies were the years of illusion... For years now
the bourgeoisie has been grasping at straws trying to prove that the crisis can
have a solution... Today the bourgeoisie has abandoned this illusion... (it has
discovered in a muffled but painful way that there is no solution to the crisis. Recognizing the impasse, there is
nothing left but a leap in the dark. And for the bourgeoisie a leap in the dark
is war..

Today,
with the total failure of the economy, the bourgeoisie is slowly realizing its
true situation and is acting on it. On the one hand it is arming to the
teeth... But armaments are not the only field of its activity... the
bourgeoisie has also under­taken a massive campaign to create an atmosphere of war-psychosis
in order to prepare public opinion for its increasingly war-like projects". (‘The 80's: years of truth')

Following the barrage
provoked by the seizure of hostages in Iran, we emphasized
the intensif­ication of the ideological campaign, especially in the USA:

"While one of America's objectives in the
present crisis is to strengthen the inter­national cohesion of its bloc,
another, even more important objective is to whip up a war-psychosis... A
torrent of war hysteria like this hasn't been seen for a long time... Faced
with a population that has traditionally not been favorable to the idea of
foreign intervention... and which has been markedly cool towards adventures of
this kind since the Vietnam war, the ‘barbarous' acts of the ‘Islamic Republic'
have been an excellent theme for the war campaigns of the American bourgeoisie.
Khomeini has found the Shah to be an excellent bugbear to use for reforging the
unity of the nation. Carter -- whether, as it would seem, he deliberately
provoked the present crisis by letting the Shah into the States, or whether he's
merely using the situation, has found Khomeini to be an equally useful bugbear
in his efforts to reinforce national unity at home and get the American
population used to the idea of foreign intervention, even if this doesn't
happen in Iran." (Behind the
Iran-US crisis, the ideological campaigns).

A few days after we
wrote these lines, the events in Afghanistan and their aftermath confirmed this analysis. On the one
hand they highlighted the profound aggravation of inter-imperialist tensions;
on the other hand, they allowed the western bloc to intensify its ideological
campaign. But while the war-like campaign around the events in Afghanistan were a continuation of the one whipped up
over Iran, the events
that took place in these two countries were not of the same nature and didn't
have the same function in the context of inter-imperialist rivalries.

The gravity of what's at stake

The Iranian events did
not directly threaten the imperialist interests of the USA, despite the difficulties it's had to face since the fall
of the Shah and the wave of anti-Americanism which has swept the country. This
was confirmed when Russian troops entered Afghanistan and Bani Sadr announced that Iran would be sending military aid to the Afghan guerillas. In
contrast, the intervention of the Russian armed forces really was an attack on
US strategic interests, inasmuch as it:

permitted the
installation of military bases in a country which stands between Pakistan, Iran, China, and the USSR;

represented a break
in the growing encircle­ment of the USSR by the US bloc, an encirclement which has been further aggravated by
the integration of China into the Western bloc;

allowed the USSR to come within 400 km, of the Indian Ocean, an outlet which it has always lacked;

represented
a much more direct threat to the main sources of oil for the Western bloc and
to the extremely important Ormuz straits.

This is why we cannot
see this intervention merely as an operation of Russian domestic policy, as
some have claimed, aimed simply at preserving order within its own bloc or its
own frontiers against the threat posed by the Islamic agitation. The real
issues are much more serious and have meant that the Russians are prepared to pay
the price of the murderous resistance of the Afghan guerillas. In reality, the ‘pacification
of the feudal rebels' was above all a pretext enabling the USSR to improve a
military-strategic position that has been continuously deteriorating over the
last few years. Taking advantage of the decomposition of the political
situation in Iran, which used to have the mission of acting as the US gendarme in the region, the USSR took the risk of a grave international crisis in order to
transform Afghanistan into a military base. This is why the ideological barrage
in the Western bloc, especially in America, over the Afghanistan events was not simply hot air, as it was over the Iran episode. Even if it was part of the ideological campaign
that had already got going, it expressed a real concern of the US bloc about
the Russian advance, and thus constituted a real aggravation of
inter-imperialist tensions, one more step towards a new world war.

The war-like campaigns of the USA
and the Western Bloc

However, despite the
gravity for the US bloc of the massive installation of Russian troops in Afghanistan, the American bloc wasn't able to do anything to stop it.
Today it's trying to make up for and utilize this partial set-back by a
deafening intensification of its war-like campaigns, so that, when necessary, it will be able to send
in its expeditionary corps without fear of internal dissent. Carter's official
decisions to set up an expeditionary force of 110,000 men and to re-register
young people for an eventual mobilization -- decisions taken when the campaign
was reaching its paroxysm-- are a clear expression of this policy. The
unfolding of the events in Iran and Afghanistan leads to the following
conclusion: everything happened as though the USA foresaw the Russian
intervention in Afghanistan (its ‘experts' and observation satellites have some
uses after all!) and consciously provoked
the seizure of hostages in Tehran by letting the Shah into the States when they
knew what reaction this would stir up. This allowed them to let the situation
in Iran decompose even further, in order to isolate the extremist elements and
force the ‘moderates' to take things in hand in favor of the US (the ‘anti-Russian'
turn of events being guaranteed by the USSR's intervention against a brother
Islamic country . This is what Bani Sadr is trying to do now).

What's more, the events
in Iran allowed the campaign to be mounted in two stages:

first, you stir up
war hysteria in the name of defending American citizens or of responding to an ‘affront
against national honor';

next,
when the USSR goes into action, you give a new push to a
campaign that's beginning to wear out by pointing to the real enemy: the USSR (the US bourgeoisie simply used Khomeini as a
bugbear to set its campaign in motion).

But even
if we have to guard against too Machiavellian a view in the analysis of
political events -- the bourgeoisie always being at the mercy of imponderable
elements -- and even if the whole operation wasn't planned with such precision,
it's important to point out the breadth of the present ideological campaign.
This was in no way improvised and had been in preparation for many months,
notably since the sudden and showy ‘discovery' of Russian troops in Cuba -- troops which had already been there for
years.

And everything indicates
that the USA and its bloc are not prepared to abandon this campaign, that they
have decided to make maximum use of the present situation in order to tighten
their ideological grip on the population and achieve the ‘national solidarity'
which is so precious and so necessary in all wars. Thus the embargo on grain
and the boycott of the Olympic Games are not so much directly aimed at putting
pressure on the USSR (which can buy what it wants from elsewhere and can live
without the Olympic Games) as at keeping up this war-like tension, at
ideologically mobilizing the population of its own bloc.

Even though the role of
revolutionaries isn't to make a choice between the imperialist blocs, even if
it's not up to them, as Bordiga and his followers once did, to say that one is ‘More
dangerous' than the other, and to ‘consider preferable the defeat of the
stronger' (sic:), they must still denounce the lies and dangerous ideological campaigns
of the bourgeoisie, especially their most mystifying elements, as they did
between the wars on the question of ‘anti-fascism'.

Today one of the
battle-cries of the US bloc is its alleged military ‘weakness' vis-a-vis a USSR which is becoming better armed and more and more ‘aggressive'.
In reality, the military ‘superiority' of the Russian bloc is a pure lie, a
creation of propaganda, The authoritative Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute (SIPRI), which can hardly be suspected of pro-Russian
sympathies, dealt with this question in its 1979 report, calling it a "particularly successful propaganda exercise"
on the part of the Western countries. It's true that armaments expenditure in
the USSR and its bloc have continued to grow over the last few
years: in 1958, Russian expenditure on arms made up 20.3% of the world total.
In 1978, it was up to 25.5%. But even at the latter date they were still slightly
less than the USA's share: 25.6%. On the other hand, the total expenses of
NATO in 1978 made up 42.8% of the world total, as against the Warsaw Pact's
28.6% (figures from SIPRI).

Although these figures
are significant, they have to be completed by the following facts:

They
don't take into account the accumulation of arms in the previous period, which
was much greater in NATO than in the Warsaw Pact (in 1968, NATO expenditure
made up 56.2% of the world total, as against the Warsaw Pact's 25.3%).

They
only include the two official military alliances and thus exclude countries
like China (which alone accounts for 10.5% of the world total)
which undoubtedly belong to the American bloc, whereas the only important
Russian-bloc country which isn't affiliated to the Warsaw Pact is Vietnam.

They
say nothing about the quality of the arms themselves nor about their quantity:
the USSR's enormous technological inferiority to the USA means that Russian weapons are much less
perfect, effective, and viable, that they are more expensive to produce and
demand more manpower to put them to use, for equal effect.

Thus:

with less land and
submarine missiles (1700 against 2400) the USA can launch two or three times as many nuclear war-heads
(7700 against 3100) than the USSR (an American rocket can carry up to 14 atomic charges);

the 415 American ‘strategic'
bombers can carry 5400 atomic bombs whereas the 180 Pussian bombers can only
carry 1,800;

of the
12,000 American nuclear rocket-launchers, 10,400 are mobile (submarines or
planes) and thus practically invulnerable, whereas only 3000 of the 5000
Russian rocket launch-pads are in the same situation;

in order to use these
nuclear arsenals, 75,000 American soldiers are needed as against 400,000
Russians, even though, contrary to the legend, NATO has always had more men
under arms than the Warsaw Pact (despite the fact that Russia has more soldiers
than America).

The American bloc's enormous superiority also applies
to classical armaments: is it by accident that Israel, using American arms, has always won its wars
against the Arab countries armed by the USSR? That, in 1973, Israel stopped the 2,000 Syrian tanks bound for
Faifa after they'd moved only 10 km -- the same tanks with which the Warsaw
Pact is equipped and which have been presented as the threat to Western Europe; Or are we to believe that Jehova is
stronger than Allah?

In reality, the crushing
military superiority of the western camp doesn't have any mysterious origins.
As Engels said a long time ago, military superiority is always an expression of
economic superiority. And the economic superiority of the West is equally
crushing.

For example:

in 1978,
the gross production of the Warsaw Pact countries was 1,365 billion dollars;

in the
same year, the figure for the NATO countries was 4,265 billion.

And if we
include the gross production of the other important countries of the Western
bloc we arrive at 6200 billion, whereas the Eastern bloc is more or less made
up of the Warsaw Pact countries. It's hardly worth counting Vietnam's 8.9 billion or Ethiopia's 3.6.

Another
fact: among the twelve economically most powerful countries in the world, only
two belong to the Eastern bloc: USSR (no.3) and Poland (no.12). All the others are entirely integrated into the Western bloc.

It is
precisely because of this enormous economic weakness that the USSR appears to be the ‘aggressive' power in
most local conflicts. As was the case with Germany in 1914 and 1939, it's the country which
has come off worst in the dividing up of an already limited imperialist cake
which tends to put the whole division into question.

This is a
constant reality in the decadent period of capitalism. It expresses both the
ineluctable character of imperialist war and its absurdity even from the
bourgeois economic standpoint (not to mention its absurdity for humanity).

Last century, when
capitalism was in the ascendant, wars could have a real rationality, especially
colonial wars. Certain countries could throw themselves into a war with the
guarantee that this would pay off on the economic level (new markets, raw
materials, etc). In contrast to this, the wars of the 20th century are expre­ssions
of the impasse in which capitalism finds itself. Since the world is entirely
divided up between the major imperialist powers, wars can no longer lead to the
conquest of new markets, and thus to a new field of expansion for capitalism.
They simply result in a redivision of the existing markets. This isn't
accompanied by the possibility of a great new development of the productive
forces, but, on the contrary, by the massive destruction of the productive
forces, because such wars

no longer take place
simply between the advanced countries and the backward countries, but between the
great powers themselves, which involves a much higher level of destruction;

can no
longer remain isolated but lead to butchery and destruction on a global scale.

Thus, imperialist wars
appear as a pure aberration for the whole of capitalism, and this absurdity is,
among other things, expressed by the fact that it's the very bloc that's
condemned to ‘lose' -- because it's weaker economically -- which is forced to
push hardest for a war (if it makes sense at all to talk of losers and victors
in today's conditions!) This ‘suicidal' behavior on the part of the eventual
loser isn't the result of its leaders going mad. It's an expression of the
inevitable character of war under decadent capitalism, of an ineluctable
juggernaut which is completely out of the control of the ruling classes and
their governments. The march towards suicide by the so-called ‘aggressive'
powers simply expresses the fact that the whole of capitalism is marching
towards suicide.

The fact
that, in general, the most ‘belligerent' imperialism loses the war, gives a
semblance of credibility to all the post-war masquerades about ‘reparations',
trials of ‘war criminals', of those who are ‘responsible' for the holocaust (as if all the governments, all
the bourgeois parties, all the
military leaders weren't criminals, weren't responsible for the orgy of murder,
for the massacre and destruction of imperialist wars). Through these
masquerades, the victorious imper­ialism can cover up its attempts to cash in
on its own military expenditure, and to install in the defeated countries a
ruling political team which corresponds to its interests.

All is
fair in bourgeois propaganda: the deaths at Auschwitz are used to justify the deaths in Dresden and Hiroshima; the deaths in Vietnam are used to justify those in Afghanistan; past massacres
are used to prepare future massacres. Similarly, the arms expenditures (real or
exagger­ated) and the imperialist maneuvers of the ‘enemy' bloc are used to
justify the military expenditures, the resulting austerity and the imperialist
maneuvers of one's ‘own' bloc -- to prepare the ‘national solidarity' needed
for the next holocaust.

Just as
revolutionaries have to denounce the mystifications which accompany the
imperialist policies of the Eastern bloc, notably the myth of ‘national
liberation' (something we've always done in our press), so they also have to
unmask the hypocrisy of the ideological campaigns of the Western bloc.

The division of labor between sectors of
the bourgeoisie

In no.20 of the IR, we dealt at length with the main
features of the present ideological offensive of the bourgeoisies of the
American bloc in preparation for imperialist war: the creation of a
war-psychosis aimed at demoralizing the population, at making them accept with
fatalism and resignation the perspective of a new world war. We have just been
examining another aspect of this offensive: the development of an ‘anti-Russian'
feeling, through such things as the lies about levels of armaments, campaigns
about ‘human rights' and the boycott of the Olympics. This is still an
incomplete list of the methods being used by the bourgeoisie of the Western
countries to prepare the population, and above all the exploited class, for the
‘supreme sacrifice'. We must add a campaign that is less noisy but more
insidious and dangerous: the one
aimed more specifically at the working class.

The first type of
campaign has mainly been carried out by the right and centre parties of the
bourgeoisie, whose language consists in calling on ‘all the citizens' to realize a ‘national
unity' in the face of the
dangers threatening the ‘country' or ‘civilization'.
Behind the creation of an ‘anti-Russian' phobia which completes the first kind of
campaign, you will find the same parties,
to which should be joined the social democratic
parties whose arguments are more nuanced
and less hysterical, but who won't pass up an opportunity to denounce Stalinism
and the violat­ion of human rights in the east. Obviously, the ‘Communist'
parties don't participate directly in this variety of ideological campaign:
despite the fact that some of them have been obliged to condemn certain actions
by the USSR in order to pacify the bourgeoisie and ‘public opinion' in their respective
countries.

On the
other hand, there is one aspect of the ideological offensive of the bourgeoisie
which is common to both
parties whose specific function is to contain the working class -- the SPs and
CPs. The language of the left of capital is presented as the opposite of the
language of the right: in fact it is complementary. This language consists of a
denunciation of the alarmist campaigns of the right, of an assertion that there
is no real danger of war at present. In some countries, like France, we've even seen the left declaring unanimously that the
alarmist campaign of the right has the aim of diverting the attention of the
workers and imposing additional austerity on them. The language of the left is
obviously connected to the fact that, at the present time, they have been
compelled to carry out their capitalist function in opposition, the better to
sabotage the workers struggles from within. Since they're not in government,
they don't have the job of creating ‘national unity' around the leaders of the
country[1]; their task is to radicalize their language in order to win
the confidence of the workers, so that they can lead the class into a dead-end
and wear out its combativity.

But this isn't the only
reason why the left parties are sticking to their soothing words. Their
language has the aim of filling in the gaps left by the ideological campaign of
the right. The right is more and more emphasizing a partial truth: that war is
inevitable (obviously without making it clear that such a fatality exists only
in the framework of capitalism). The aim of this is to demoralize the whole
population, to make it accept with resignation the sacrifices of today in order
to prepare for the still greater sacrifices of the future. But this half-truth
has the inconvenient feature of being a recognition that capitalist society is
now in a total impasse. In certain sectors of the population, above all the
proletariat, the class which is best equipped to put the whole system into
question, this propaganda runs the risk of having the opposite effect to what
was intended. It could help the workers to see the necessity for a massive
confrontation against capitalism, in order to stay its criminal hand and
destroy it. The soothing words of the left allow capital to run the whole gamut
of mystifications, to plug up any gaps which might let the working class develop its
consciousness.

Already the left and
right have divided up the work concerning the economic crisis: the right saying
that the crisis was world-wide, that nothing could be done about it, that
austerity was the only resort; and the left replying; that the crisis was the
result of bad policies, of the wicked doings of the monopolies, and that you
could overcome the crisis by applying policies which really corresponded
to the interests of the nation and of the workers. Thus, the right was already calling for resignation, for
accepting austerity without resistance, while the left got down to the job of
derailing working class discontent into the electoral dead-end of the ‘left
alternative' (the Labor government in Britain, the union of the left in France,
the historic compromise in Italy, etc...)

This
division of labor between the right and the left, aimed at subordinating the
whole of society, and above all the working class, to the needs of capital, is
nothing new. It was put to use during the ideological preparations for the First
World War. On the one hand, the right wing of capital was shouting the loudest
about patriotism and openly calling for war against the ‘hereditary enemy', on
the other hand, the opportunists and reformists who were helping to push the
parties of the II International into the carp of capital, while attacking the
chauvinist hysteria, continuously minimized the dangers of war. The left of the
International (notably Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg) was insisting that imperialist
war was an inevitability within the logic of capitalism, that the workers had
to mobilize themselves on a massive scale to prevent capitalism from having a
free hand and to prepare for the destruction of the system. The right, on the
other hand, whose influence was growing, was developing a whole theory about the possibility of a ‘peaceful'
capitalism, able to resolve conflicts between nations through ‘arbitration'. As
long as the working class was mobilized, notably through mass demonstrations in
response to the various conflicts which broke out at the beginning of the century
(Franco-German confrontations over Morocco, conflicts in the Balkans, invasion
of the Tripolitaine by Italy, etc...); as long as the left had a preponderant
influence within the International (special notions against war at the
Congresses of 1907 and 1910, Extraordinary Congress in 1912 on the same
question) , the bourgeoisie could not allow these conflicts to degenerate into
a generalized war. It wasn't until the working class, lulled by the speeches of
the opportunists, ceased to mobilize itself against the threat of war (between
1912 and 1914) that capitalism could unleash a generalized war following an
incident that was seemingly trivial in relation to previous ones (the Sarajevo
assassination).

Thus the ideological
preparation for world war wasn't simply a matter of chauvinist, war-like
hysteria. It was also made up of the soothing, pacifist sermons disseminate by
the political forces who had most influence on the working class. These sermons
helped to demobilize the class, to make it lose sight of what was really at
stake, to tie it hand and feet and deliver it over to the bourgeois governments
and the whole war hysteria; in sum, it served to prevent the class from playing
its role as the only force that could prevent world war. The mobilization for
imperialist war demands the demobilization of the proletariat from its class
terrain.

What
perspective: War or Revolution?

We can
clearly affirm that the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and its aftermath express and accentuate
the acceleration of the drive towards
generalized imperialist war, capital's only solution of its crisis. Should we
therefore question the analysis that the ICC has put forward since it was
formed, concerning the historic course, our conclusion that what is on the
agenda is not a generalized imperialist confrontation, but massive
confrontations between the working class and the bourgeoisie?

The
answer is no. In fact, the
determination with which the bourgeoisie is going about the ideological
preparations for war itself indicates that the subjective conditions for such
an outcome to the capitalist crisis have not been met. For some, if world war
hasn't yet broken out, it's because the objective conditions -- economic
situation, military preparations, etc. don't yet exist. This is the thesis
defended, for example, by the International Communist Party (Programme
Communiste). In reality, if we compare the present situation to the one existing
in 1939 or 1914, we can see that, from the standpoint of the gravity of the
crisis, the level of armaments, and the strengthening military alliances within
each bloc, the conditions for a new world war are even more ripe today. The
only missing factor -- although a decisive one -- is the proletariat's adherence
to bourgeois ideals, its discipline and submission towards the needs of the
national capital. This adherence, discipline and submission did exist in 1939,
following the most terrible defeat in the history of the working class; a
defeat that was all the more terrible because at the end of the first world
war, the proletariat had risen to its greatest heights, a defeat that was both
physical and ideological, a long list of massacres and mystifications, especially
about the so-called socialist nature of Russia; a procession of defeats
presented as victories. These were similar to the conditions which existed in
1914, although the defeat of the working class then was much less profound than
it was in 1939, and this allowed for the resurgence of 1917-18. The 1914 defeat
was essentially on the ideological level. It took the form of the opportunist
gangrene which more and more infected the IInd International, culminating in
1914 with the treason of most of its parties. When they went over to the enemy,
these parties, as well as the trade unions, were able to hand the proletariat
over to the imperialist appetites of the bourgeoisie, dragging; it into ‘national
defense' and ‘the defense of civilizations' - precisely because these
organizations still retained the hearts and minds of the working class. And
this mobilization of the proletariat behind national capital was facilitated by
the fact that, with the exception of Russia, there was no important development of the class struggle
just prior to 1914, and that the economic crisis had not had time to really
deepen before it had broken out in war. The situation is very different today.
The mystifications which were used to mobilize the class for World War II,
notably anti-fascism and the myth of socialism in Russia, have long since lost
their old force. It's the same with the belief in the unending progress of ‘civilization'
and ‘democracy' which existed in 1914, but which after over half a century of
decadence have been replaced by a general disgust for the system. Similarly the
parties of the left, which betrayed the working class a long time ago, no
longer have the same impact on the class as they had in 1914 or the 1930's.
Furthermore, capitalism's deepening slide into the crisis since the mid-sixties
has provoked a historical resurgence of the class struggle. Thus, instead of
announcing to the proletariat that the game is up, that, whatever it does, it
can't prevent the outbreak of a new holocaust, it's the task of revolutionaries
to indicate to their class that the historical situation is still in its hands,
that it depends on its struggles
whether or not humanity will go down under a deluge of thermo­nuclear bombs.

However,
this situation is not fixed in a definitive manner. If today the road is not
open to the bourgeois solution to the crisis, that shouldn't lead us to believe
that nothing can change this situation, that the historic course cannot be
reversed. In reality, what could be called the ‘normal' course of capitalist
society is towards war. The resistance of the working class, which can put this
course into question, appears as a sort of ‘anomaly', as something running ‘against
the stream', of the organic processes of the capitalist world. This is why,
when we look at the eight decades of this century, we can find hardly more than
two during which the balance of forces was sufficiently in the proletariat's
favor for it to have been able to bar the way to imperialist war (1905-12,
1917-23, 1968-80).

For the
moment, the potential combativity of the class, which began to manifest itself
after 1968, has not been destroyed. But it is necessary to be vigilant, and the
events in Afghanistan are a reminder of this necessity. This is
because:

the more slowly the
proletariat responds to the crisis, the less experienced and prepared it will
be when it enters into decisive confront­ations with capitalism;

whereas the
proletariat has only one road to victory -- armed, generalized confrontation
with the bourgeoisie -- the latter has at its disposal numerous and varying
means with which to defeat its enemy. It can derail its combativity into
dead-ends (this is the present tactic of the left); it can crush it sector by
sector (as it did in Germany between 1918 and 1923); or it can crush it physically
during a frontal confrontation (even so, this remains the kind of confrontation
most favorable to the proletariat).

This
vigilance which the working class must keep up,
and which revolutionaries must contribute to as much as possible, involves the
clearest possible understanding of what's at stake in the present situation and
in the struggles it's engaged in today.
The contribution to this made by revolutionaries can't consist of
the assertion that nothing can be done about the threat
of imperialist war. If they did this they would become auxiliaries
to the campaign of demoralization
being waged by the right. Neither can they go around saying that there is no
real danger of an imperialist war, of a reversal of the balance of forces
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. If they did, their ‘contribution'
would simply add grist to the mills of the left. If revolutionaries are going
to be able to denounce both the campaigns of the right and of the left, they
can't do this simply by affirming the opposite of what either of them say. No! We
must be able to throw the bourgeoisie's various arguments back into its face:

it's true that there
is no way out of the crisis and that there is a threat of war, as the right
says

it's true, as the
left says, that the alarmist campaigns are being used to impose austerity...

In both cases, this is
ample reason not for resigning ourselves, but for launching ourselves into a
resistance against austerity, the prelude to the struggle to destroy the
system. In its coming struggles the working class must develop a clear
understanding of what's at stake, of the fact that today's struggle isn't
simply a blow-for-blow resistance against the growing attacks of capital, but
that it is the only rampart against the threat of imperialist war, that it is
the indispensable preparation for the only way out for humanity: the communist
revolution. Such an understanding of what's really at stake is a precondition
not only for the immediate effectiveness of the struggle, but also for its
capacity to serve as a real preparation for the decisive
confrontations that lie ahead.

On the other hand, any
struggle which is restricted to a purely economic or defensive level will be
defeated all the more easily, both in an immediate sense and as part of a much
broader struggle. When this happens the workers are deprived of that vital
weapon, the general­ization of the struggle, which is based on an awareness
that the class war is a social, not a professional phenomenon. Similarly, if
they lack any broader perspectives, immediate defeats will be a factor of
demoralization instead of fruitful experiences that assist the development of
class consciousness.

If the new wave of class
struggle that is now underway is to avoid being worn out by the maneuvers of
the left and the unions -- which would leave a free rein to the war-like ‘solution'
to the crisis -- if it is to be a real step towards the revolutionary offensive
for the overthrow of capitalism it must contain the following three
inter-linked characteristics:

a
rejection of the union prison and a direct taking-in-hand of the struggle by
the workers themselves;

a growing
use of the weapon of generalization, the extension of the struggle beyond sectoral
categories, enterprises, industrial branches, towns and regions and, finally,
national frontiers;

a growing awareness
of the indissoluble link between the struggle against austerity, the struggle
against the threat of war, and the struggle against this moribund, dying
society and for the creation of communism.

FM

[1] Where the left is still in government, its attitude isn't clear. In
Belgium we've even seen the Socialist foreign minister making alarmist
speeches, while his equally Socialist colleague, the minister of social
affairs, was saying the opposite.